


The Choir is Dead Anyhow

by vacantseats



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-02
Updated: 2015-04-01
Packaged: 2018-03-20 20:29:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3663930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vacantseats/pseuds/vacantseats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before, there is a broken down car, casual observance, and the beginning of a friendship.</p>
<p>In-between, there is insomnia and alcohol and violence.</p>
<p>And after...there is still a lot left to be said.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Choir is Dead Anyhow

**Author's Note:**

> Uhm. Yeah, I don't really know what this turned into??? It was supposed to be about how Gansey and Adam and Ronan became friends?? And then it morphed into this? But yeah uhm, all the Before sections are still how they became friends and are pretty light. The Interlude sections are going to be a bit darker, but still during that frienship. And the After is set 10 years after Gansey dies (I'm just running with it, even though it's making me incredibly sad). I'll trigger warn at the beginning of each chapter.
> 
> TW for alcohol consumption & drug use.

**_Before_ **

 

Gansey is running late to school.

He is running late to school because he hit the snooze button on his alarm a dangerous 3rd time instead of his usual allowance of two. (Two snoozes still gives him enough time to shower, get dressed, fix his hair, and make a mug of coffee to bring along with his morning apple. Three snoozes throws the entire schedule off balance.)

He hit the snooze button three times instead of two because he was up until 4 in the morning. 

He was up until 4 in the morning because he’d been reading a new book on Henry IV’s reign.

And he’d been reading a book on Henry IV’s reign because that reign just so happened to be particularly intertwined with a certain Welsh King’s dominion.

But we’ll get there eventually.

So Gansey is running late to school, and his coffee is watery and thin without his usual exact measuring of sugar (two precise spoonfuls; he needs the extra energy), and this day was already shaping up to be a miserable one when his car starts to make that ominous growling noise that usually means only one thing.

“Oh no, oh no, please not today. Please, please, please,” Gansey begs, though to whom exactly it is unclear. He believs in no omniscient sky-beings, though he supposes it a possibility that he’d reluctantly turn to religion in old age, or else if he went through a very particular midlife crisis.

The being-less sky has nothing to offer for nonbelievers, it turns out, and so his car sputtered to a sudden halt.

He jumps out of the car and opens the hood, only to be blasted with hot, black smoke. He allows himself five seconds of pure annoyed rage at his own cluelessness, and then another thirty seconds of sulking. It was on second seventeen of this, when he was quite ready to move into the more self-pitying stage of sulking when he notices a boy on a bike coming steadily towards him. Still sulking (for ten more seconds, at least) he sticks his head back under the hood, peering uselessly at his still-smoking engine in hopes that the other boy will just ignore him and keep on biking.

If there is some sort of omniscient sky-being up there though, at this point it’s just paying him back for being heretical.

“Uhm,” he hears a voice much sooner than he thought the other boy would be able to get there by. “You need some help?”

He withdraws slowly from his engine and looks at the other boy. He’s wearing a button-up white shirt that looks like the school-regulated one they all wear underneath their uniform sweaters, and Aglionby khakis. His hair is short, but somewhat matted to his forehead with sweat.

_Why_ , Gansey wonders to himself, _did he decide to bike to school when it’s in the high 80’s out today?_

He knows that somewhere in the back of his mind he should know the other boy’s name, is positive that they have at least one class together, but he cannot for the life of him think which combination of words will match this boy’s face.

This other boy just has a face that eludes naming.

“Er, it’s fine,” he says, checking his watch. School starts in ten minutes, and though this boy is undoubtedly going to be late anyway on his bike, the last thing he wants to do is make him even later.

“No, seriously, I’m uh…good with cars,” the boy says, bringing a hand up to scratch the back of his neck. He has the faintest hint of a Henrietta accent, Gansey notices. He likes it.

“Beside, I’m already going to be late to Aglionby,” the boy gins a bit sheepishly.

And that is how Richard Campbell Gansey (the third) meets Adam Parrish.

 

**_After_ **

 

Well, there is no after for Richard Campbell Gansey (the third) because he died. Let’s pretend just for pretending’s sake though that he was able to come back as a ghost (it’s not quite as uncommon as you’d think). It is probable he would make some sort of ill-timed joke about his equally ill-timed death that would go something like, “well it looks like I never lived long enough to see my religious midlife crisis, huh?”

To which Ronan would say, “what the fuck?!”

And Adam would say, “oh my God!”

And Blue would say, “you got yourself killed, you stupid, stupid asshole, and the first thing you do is make a joke?!”

And Noah, who actually has quite a bit more experience being a ghost than the others and therefore is less surprised (but still a bit slow on the uptake) would say, “but you’re not religious.”

But Gansey didn’t come back as a ghost.

And besides, Noah was already gone by that point anyway.

 

**_Before_ **

 

Ronan would never claim to be particularly observant, but he’s not blind. Or dumb. He’s not just gonna _not notice_ when Gansey makes a third friend.

_Why do you even need a fucking third friend_ , he wants to ask him. _You already had two._

But that would sound possessive and needy and caring, and Ronan Lynch is absolutely none of those things. On paper, at least.

And besides, he’s not actually that possessive that he doesn’t want his friends to have _any_ other friends. It’s just that this particular friend is Ronan’s chosen mortal enemy. Even if he doesn’t know it yet.

Actually, he wouldn’t be surprised if Adam Parrish did know that he had mentally assigned him the label ‘enemy’. Parrish is weird and quiet, but kind of in an aloof way, not in an I’m-gonna-bring-an-ak-to-school-one-day way.

He eats lunch in the library, but always genuinely seems to have piles of work to complete. He gets perfect grades and always has the answer to a teacher’s question, but somehow doesn’t come off nerdy or eager to please—more like he’s exhausted and put-upon by how stupid everyone else is that he just _has_ to answer every question himself. He occasionally makes sarcastic comments under his breath during Latin. Not that Ronan, like, listens to him or anything.

He doesn’t have very many friends (if any), but he also maintains a air of vague disdain whenever listening to his classmates talk around him. And he rides his bike to school every day, but always manages to smell like motor oil.

Not that Ronan, like, smells him or anything.

But he’s also annoyingly good at Latin, and if Ronan is going to actually put any effort into a class, he’s damn well going to be number one in it.

At first, Gansey tries to be smooth by slowly incorporating Adam into their little trio. Noah pretty much gave a vague seal of approval immediately (“Perish? Like he died? Oh, _Parrish_ , yeah he could use some friends”) which Ronan saw as tacit betrayal.

Personally, he just grunts whenever Gansey mentions the other boy. Which is often. _Oh Adam showed me how to fix an oil leak today, oh Adam’s coming over to go over our Euro homework, oh Adam’s at work let’s go pick him up and go to Nino’s_ , until one day Ronan just snaps, “why don’t you just fucking marry him then?

Which is a bit more of a needy and possessive way of saying _shut the fuck up_ than he would have liked. But it works. Gansey is silent the entire way to the trailer factory, until they’re sitting in the parking lot because Parrish is working overtime. Because of course he fucking is.

“You know,” Gansey begins in the same tone that a precariously-placed humanitarian would probably use while talking down a genocidal dictator. “Just because I’m spending time with Adam, doesn’t mean that I value our friendship any less.”

“Oh my God, Gansey,” Ronan says, because this isn’t happening.

“No! Let me finish!” Gansey insists. “You’re still my best friend, and you will always be my best friend.”

“You’re not actually marrying Parrish, are you?”

“ _But_ I don’t think it would be the worst thing in the world if we made another friend.”

“I hate to be the one to point this out to you, but _your_ parents of all people aren’t exactly going to be thrilled to find out that their only son is into guys.”

“ _And besides_ , Noah agrees with me.”

“Actually,” and Ronan is triumphant now because he actually has something concrete to argue against, “What Noah said was ‘he could use some friends,’ not ‘he could use us as friends’.”

For a moment, they just look at one another—Gansey somewhat blank, Ronan smirking—until Gansey’s eyebrows both raise in a signal that he is about to go from beleaguered humanitarian to full-on suburban dad.

“Ronan,” he snaps, “Would it really be the worst thing in the world for you to be nice to the guy? Is it going to kill you? Because he’s a nice guy, and really smart and funny, and he could use someone being nice to him.”

At that Ronan rolls his eyes, “I don’t think Parrish really gives a fuck if anyone is nice to him or not.” What he really meant was that Adam so often seemed largely unconcerned with everything and everyone around him at Aglionby that it was difficult to picture actually caring about how people reacted to him. But that would have meant admitting to the fact that he’d been paying a good deal more attention to the other boy than he should have been in the first place.

“Of course he cares if people are nice to him!” Gansey is yelling now. Suburban dad at a little league game. “He doesn’t exactly have the easiest life, you know!”

“What do you mean?” Ronan asks, somewhat intrigued.

“Well, he’s not exactly the richest,” Gansey starts delicately, and Ronan has to fight to keep from rolling his eyes. “He works all the time, and he mentioned he was on a partial scholarship.”

“Oh the horror, you’re associating with a scholarship kid,” Ronan rolls his eyes. “Actually, tell your dad you’re marrying him first. He’ll probably be less angry about that one.”

“ _Ronan_ ,” Gansey says, and he actually sounds offended. They wait in stubborn silence for another moment, neither wanting to admit who was wrong in this scenario.

Gansey, as always, is the one to break it. “I just don’t think he has any other friends. So the least you could do is be nice.”

“Whatever,” Ronan says, and rolls his eyes again because in his opinion, he could definitely do less.

 

**But first:**

 

**_Interlude_ **

 

It is slightly coincidental that around the time Gansey befriends Adam Parrish, Ronan’s Night Horrors start getting worse.

They always get worse around the school year, when he has to sit in classrooms for hours on end learning things he does not care about for a job he will never get. His hopes for a normal life dies a cold and bloody death on the same concrete floor his father did.

So he goes less to class to soothe the Night Horrors, but then Declan notices and yells and threatens and that makes him even angrier than school ever does, so he’s back to square one.

Only this square one is filled with winged beasts who want to rip out his heart with their beaks.

It’s a cycle and there’s nothing he can do to stop it, so like everything else in his life, he tries to fight it.

The results are mixed.

He tries to induce insomnia at first. Buys vyvanse and adderall from the shady Russian kid with the nice car, and chases them with energy drinks. This has somewhat worse side effects, though.

Gansey pulls him aside in the hallway one day at school and says, “are you okay?”

“Sure, why?” Ronan replies, glancing around to see who might be watching them.

“You’re shaking,” Gansey says softly, and Ronan realizes that he is.

So he keeps the tabs he has left for a desperate time, but it’s left him manic and paranoid so that even when he’s not drugged he can’t let himself fall asleep because he’s already anticipating the claws on his arms and legs.

This isn’t doing, though, the not sleeping at all thing, so he goes for the exact opposite. He buys liquor from the shadily named ‘Alcohol Shop’ that’s down the road from Nino’s, and takes to drinking himself into a stupor.

This works somewhat better. The Night Horrors still come, but he’s too drunk to be too worried about them beforehand.

The hangovers are a bitch, though, and there’s no way to hide this from Gansey.

“Ronan, I’m getting worried,” Gansey tells him one day after school. “You can’t keep drinking this much on a school night.”

But Ronan doesn’t really care.

Or rather, of course he cares what Gansey thinks, but at this point there really isn’t another option.

He wants to tell him to fuck off, but he’s worried it will come out like _help me_ _or I’m so fucking scared_ or _I don’t know what I am,_ so instead he just takes another swig of Cuervo and doesn’t even bite one of the limes he somewhat sarcastically cut up.

Because how do you explain that to someone? That you are not a boy, but a _thing_ , a thing who dreams other things that sometimes can be brought back into the real world and other times try to kill him?

And how do you explain all of that to Gansey, who has never really been anything than what he is?

Declan is not so easy to put off, though. Either he notices that his middle brother has become eternally hungover, or Gansey tips him off, but whatever the case he corners Ronan—who had thus far been doing a great job of ignoring him—in the parking lot after school and yells at him.

And here is the thing about Declan: he was always least loved, and everyone always knew it. And if their dad taught them anything, it was that you can’t get into a fight if your enemy knows your weakness.

Declan is so easy to provoke it is almost laughable (but was he not provoked in the first place, by Declan’s pseudo attempt at being a responsible older brother? He doesn’t dwell on it) and soon they are fighting, savage and brutal out in the parking lot because this is what Ronan does best.

But Gansey is there immediately, trying to get between them and break it up, shouting, “Declan this is school property! Anyone can see! Teachers will be here in minutes!”

And because he is Declan Lynch and he cares about keeping up appearances, Declan backs up and Gansey is left barely restraining Ronan by the time Mr. Cresswell arrives to check on what happened.

“Boys, what’s going on here?” Mr. Cresswell asks, and for a minute they are all frozen, unsure of what to say.

Well, Ronan knows what he wants to say ( _just beating the shit out of my asshole older brother, Mr. Cresswell_ ) but he’s not actually stupid, so he keeps his mouth firmly shut. Neither him nor Declan are bleeding, but their knuckles are red, their ties are askew, and Ronan can feel the bruise forming on his jaw just as clearly as he can see Declan’s eye swelling.

“Nothing, Mr. Cresswell,” answers Adam Parrish—and when the fuck did he get there? Shouldn’t he have been at work by now?—of all fucking people. “Ronan and his brother were just discussing family dinner, and it got a little heated. But everything is alright, now.”

He is so calm and cool and reassuring when he says it that Ronan’s a bit shocked. They obviously weren’t fucking discussing family dinner. _What the hell does Parrish think he’s doing?_

But Mr. Cresswell is going to believe him, he realizes once he looks back at the teacher. He wants to believe that this was just a brotherly argument and not anything more, so he nods and says, “Clear out everyone.” And that’s that.

“You’re a fucking waste,” Declan sneers before leaving with the rest of the crowd, probing delicately at his swelling eye as he goes.

Gansey is, finally, silent. It is again Adam Parrish who speaks first to say, as though everything is completely normal, “are we going to Nino’s, then?”

 

**_After_ **

 

Ronan is drunk when he finally hears. He’s drunk in the forest, because 10 years later he can’t stop looking for Cabeswater even though he knows it’s gone. It died with Gansey, like a lot of other things.

He’s sitting underneath a tree—he’s not sure what kind, that was never quite his thing—wondering why all these years have gone by and he’s still here. He’s not so sure that there’s a God anymore. Thinks that if there was, it’s probable that it would have had pity on him and his wreck of a life and sucked him off to heaven. Or hell. At this point, he’s not all that picky.

He gets the call, though, that he didn’t even really think he was waiting on anymore.

His phone lights up, and seeing that number again jars him out of his self-pitying drunkenness for long enough that he can answer.

“Ronan,” Blue says once he’s pressed the phone to his ear with shaking hands.

He doesn’t speak, can’t speak. It’s been a long goddamn time.

Not as long as some others, but long enough.

When it becomes clear he’s not going to do much besides breath on the other end of the line, Blue continues. “Ronan, I need your help with something. I’m back in Henrietta, and I know that it’s not fair to ask you like this, but I really don’t know what to do.”

He pauses, takes a breath that sounds shaky even to his own ears and says, “what’s wrong?”

Blue is silent, then, and he finds that he’s worried, almost dreading what she’s going to say.

“Calla saw someone on Corpse Road, and I think we need to do something about it.”

There are exactly three people he knows in this world who she would call him about being on Corpse Road (maybe a fourth, if he’s feeling particularly magnanimous that day) and two of them are currently speaking with one another.

His breath catches audibly, and she hurries to correct him.

“Oh, no, Ronan! No, it’s not Adam!”

He feels a kind of relief then, but also a kind of anger at hearing his name again. It leaves a bitter taste in his mouth, the name _Adam Parrish_ , and he’s spent the better part of ten years and hundreds of dollars worth of liquor trying to forget that those two words can even line up in the English vernacular.

He’s so focused on quelling his rage, on trying to forget, that he almost misses what she says next.

“It’s his mom, Ronan. And Calla thinks it’s going to happen soon.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> I still don't know what this is. But there it is. Next chapter is from the POVs of Adam and Blue, probably feat. terrible parents, suicide attempts, and Ivy League.


End file.
